I wouldn’t call that crappy. In fact, it’s one of the valid ways to allow players to select between a DP and a QFC after walking forward (the other being give a DP if they do a qcf after walking forward, and a QCF/fireball if they do a HCF after walking forward).
#1 I had two different thoughts that got their wires crossed. Looking at what I posted I have no idea why I wrote the charge character thing. Your points 1 & 2 are intertwined though. There are some people that find QCF a hard motion so they go to charge characters and vice versa. Each of these can be made difficult in their own regard. What you want to avoid is making things harder than they need to be for the sake of it. If a developer wants to add a new command but needs to do it a certain way to avoid overlaps then that’s life. On the other hand you have characters like Fei Long who got back his old chicken wing command for no good reason. As it is HCF+K doesn’t overlap with anything, so why keep the UF part of it?
#2 What if they don’t want to play Zangief? How much am I losing by making the commands on some of the other moves easier to perform? Look at Ukyo’s example. We could’ve made the command for viper’s feint a bunch of other things without losing anything for it. Instead they made it harder than needed. Compare Viper with Fuerte. Fuerte has a cancel too, but he needs that cancel for movement, mix ups and all sort of other things. On top of that the cancel isn’t hard to do. If you want Viper to play at all like a regular character, you need to learn to feint the hardest knuckle. Even more so you can accidentally mess up the feint and get EX moves. You switch the feint button to kicks and suddenly she is way easier to play while not compromising anything. Instead they went with the more obtuse way of doing things. They could’ve made feint a motion too (since it technically already is) and still achieved much of the same result. You have two characters with hard execution for different reasons.
#3 If you don’t know how Eddie applies to your comment then you need to play some more games. MvC3 is filled with fraudulently easy things to do. The game still has people who do things which require hard execution. Having made the special moves easy to do has in no way impeded the people who love hard execution things to do what they like.
So to make your life easy:
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SF creates different playstyles not execution levels. Some playstyles require more execution than other but you still shouldn’t make the moves hard to do for no reason becuase
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It limits the amount of characters a player can use. This means all players from top to bottom. Not a lot of people were fucking with Viper and Gen in the early days of SF4 because they required an immense amount of execution compared to other things. Gen gets target combos and becomes easier to play and suddenly there are a lot more of them. Sure they could play the one character “designed” for scrubs. But if you can make the character’s move easier than harder to do you should because:
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People who have great execution and love doing technical things always do this. MarlinPie played cammy in SSF4 as opposed to viper and he has ridiculous execution. Kazunoko also has great execution but he plays Yun for which you don’t need it. Some characters are hard to play solely because they require you to do a lot. Asking the player to do a lot to win isn’t the same as asking the player to grind out hadoukens because you gave it an obtuse command.
I’ve gone on the record a bunch of times saying that I like hard games. I like the feeling of landing some sweet combos. As I mentioned some pages, the physicality of fighting games is one of the great things about it. Execution matters for a lot of important reasons. Missing combos and punishes is part of the tension this genre has over others. On the other hand, spending time grinding Just Frame moves (which I have) is about as fun as getting hit in the balls. If it isn’t fun for somebody who likes the game, how fan is that gonna be for the dude who likes that character but is nowhere near close to having the technical ability to play him?
Lol at that last part. At least you tried.
Damn, pertho is taking everyone to school. I think he’s made it as clear as it can be, and yet still there are responses that seem to have no grasp of what is being said.
That’s because it seems to be quite hard to get people to actually read these things. Pertho, ukyo and even I had made some pretty decent arguments, using a good amount of logic and even added some supporting arguments from other players/developers who share the same viewpoint. Yet most people don’t seem to really want to understand what it is we’re talking about since all they see is the word “execution” and they all get their panties all twisted up because they don’t actually understand what we’er talking about and just see people saying things against it.
As we’ve all been saying, we’re not exactly against execution per se. What we’ve all been arguing about is how certain execution requirements, usually those for low level stuff, can act as a wall that prevents people from picking characters/games up, and how this isn’t exactly a good thing. High level execution, stuff like combos, advanced movement, etc. is fine, since this is stuff that the players create and develop as the a game’s meta matures. But putting it as a barrier that keeps people from actually being able to do basic stuff is stupid.
@Pertho I don’t think it’s fair of you to ask such questions because they are coming from a mindset that is different from mine and Damdai’s.
"Besides, if we can make a special move easier without compromising the integrity of the game (something which ultimately helps newer players get through that total scrub level faster) why shouldn’t devs do it?"
You want to make game easier so that new/more people can play it. That’s understandable, but we don’t care about making the community bigger. We care more about the games themselves.
As ukyo said:
"Taking away random stuff"
I feel like the randomness is apart of ST’s charm. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good idea and everything but I don’t think it’s necessary.
This reminds me of when SHMUP fans wanted Cave to add the lag found originally in certain stages (can’t remember what game). Cave fixed the lag issue in the console port but the fans wanted it back. They wanted to keep the game as pure as possible. Imperfections and all.
"Sure it made the motion easier, but it also took away T.Hawk’s option select with dragon punch. A bit of the execution became less stringent just to resolve some of the random input timings. You have to be on a special kind of high to say that you made the game shittier by taking away the random shit."
If Damdai could already do all of the hard stuff with T. Hawk, taking it all away gives Damdai a disadvantage.
And option select DP isn’t really random. Much in the same same way people think O. Ryu’s Air unblockable tatsu is random. Maybe it is but I don’t think so. Damdai did five consecutive unblockable tatsu’s at one tournament.
"It wasn’t you per say but just making shit harder for the sake of being harder doesn’t do much of anything."
See, I have more of a “laissez faire” mentality when it comes to this. Rather than change anything, just accept it for what it is and adapt.
If a game developer implements hard commands into their game, great. If Capcom made a certain command for one of Viper’s moves harder than it needs to be, all good.
If any game developer wants to make certain moves for the sake of being hard, go for it. I won’t complain because I don’t mind. Making games easier for players is not my primary concern or a concern, period.
If I did care about the community or motions, balancing, and all that other stuff, then my DP/TK Demon Flip statements would still apply, but they don’t anymore.
Really, when it all comes down to it, this thread is all about one’s mindset.
I feel like your posts directed at me should be directed at someone else. Specifically the one who wants to bring in new players but at the same time, they want to keep the games the same. Someone who wants to bring in more people/new players but they want everyone to play ST instead of HDR. The irony. lol.
I feel my arguments have mostly been sidestepped and declared invalid because an analogy doesn’t map perfectly from one game to another (and because of a general lack of charity, ie. most of you think execution is extraneous to the move itself, I try to show how, but the argument isn’t being considered from a viewpoint of “maybe it can be, why do you think that” but rather “Look, you’re wrong because it’s extraneous. Rarity is a better comparison” which is basically just spitting in the other party’s face). Things haven’t gotten addressed, that is. Pertho came closest to an actually good reply.
If you look at the numbered list I’m mostly in the same camp, probably. I just don’t believe the other kind of design is categorically bad, just that we need more games with the other tack because nowhere near enough are being made.
More Smash, Nidhogg, Divekick: Things made from the ground up around simpler inputs. More games like VSav, KOF 2k2 where special move inputs are strict and the buffer pretty short so the game feels sharp and obeys you, but most of the full gameplay is movement and using buttons properly. I like a simpler, lower-floor design with basic characters and higher-floor character designs and high-ceiling ways of using simpler characters for the experienced people.
I understand what you’re talking about, it’s just that you tend to present it as the only Good™ way to do things and that any argument to the contrary is wrong because it’s not the Good™ way. If you don’t think like that, try to pay attention to the way you present arguments.
To be honest I find 2D fighting have a sick execution when it comes to combos. I play a lot of 3D fighting games mostly Tekken and I find it less execution heavy, don’t get me wrong Tekken also has some hard stuff like just frames and the mouvement and the defense. In tekken combos are so much easier even with the mishimas you can do some good dmg with easy stuff so maybe that’s the thing that balance fighting games in street fighter it’s easy to move and punish but harder to combo and in Tekken it’s the opposite .
This is different. The lag in those games actually helps players since it slows down the bullets and makes them easier to dodge.
And since the point of playing those competitively is for score, the change in the speed can affect the final score that can be achieved. So you could be competing against someone’s score done on a different platform, and one of you may have an advantage due to lag/lack of it.
same thing with Metal Slug. The frame drop due to the hardware limitation of that era became an integral part of the game. SNK fighters like Garou featured that frame drop in special moves. Removing that to make those games more fluid feels like changing the game significantly.
Also 3s playerbase rejected the revision that nerfed Urien and Q.
Post Vampire Savior games were not widely accepted.
all those games were a product of their time.
Their execution as well.
I kind of agree with all of this. In all honesty, I fully believe that we need to preserve our games because that’s kind of our historical record of what works, why it works there and what doesn’t. HDR was put in a weird situation because it got sold as a fixed version of ST. HDR is not ST, its HDR. I can’t really say anything about most of this because I basically agree with it. If capcom tried to sell a perfect port of ST and it had the HDR stuff in it, I’d be mad as all fuck. On the other hand, HDR is its own game.
We can discuss whether or not these things need to be kept if another version of SF2 comes out, but ST things not being in HDR is consistent with all the changes from SF2 versions. ST needs to stay ST; HDR needs to stay HDR; playing mix and match with both and selling it as either ST or HDR would be bad for a lot of reasons I’m not listing.
Alright, so there is a character that perfectly fits what you were bringing up: MvC3 Dante. In Vanilla, Dante was this wacky bullshit character that was limited by his really hard execution. That didn’t really stop people from going full nuts with him. He was so wacky that he had combos that built 2.5 meters. All in all the dude was just a walking clusterfuck of destruction.
See people were already doing a lot of his bullshit regardless of the commands. The character was just bonkers and we ALL knew it. Given a couple of years, If they’d let him rock, a lot of matches were gonna turn into combo videos. It just so happened that they recognized execution didn’t stop people from doing busted things with the busted character. They can claim it was a trade off but the way the game was going, Dante was going sit on that A~S tier. How did they solve this? When they switched over to UMvC3, they figured that lot of DMC fans would wanna play the character but his execution was just dumb. They switched his special moves from rekkas to get to his other moves to the motion plus a second button tap. This normally wouldn’t have changed anything in all his wackiness but they decided that, since he would be easier to play, that Dante suddenly needed some nerfs.
A good example of this was his most egregious tool: Hammer. This thing was all hitbox and invincibility. For the lowly price of QCFx2 and a button, you got a move that would prevent people from mixing you up, beat invincible moves and attack through some level 3s. Capcom is releasing a new version of MvC3, they know for a fact that they made a broken ass character so what do they do? They option select easier moves with “no attack that is this easy to do should be doing that”. The problem is that the attack shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place. It was already frustrating as balls. Dante could pressure people by doing random hammers from slightly whiffing distance. That meant that if you hit any button you would just get hit with hammer and then comboed for your trouble. All that was gonna happen by making it easier was point out to everybody how dumb the thing was.
Ultimately no, making the command somewhat hard won’t prevent people from doing it. If you make a ridiculous move, the move is going to be ridiculous. The one person will do it consistently and he’ll annoy everybody else by being the only person who can do the ridiculous move. If a player that figured out some ridiculous set ups, mix ups, combos or w/e, they can have that all they want. Figuring that stuff out is part of the game. Making an obviously bullshit move like hammer and then trying to hide it behind a hard command just means fewer people will do it.
That’s why we know that trying to hide certain moves behind an execution barrier is a terrible idea. When you do that you aren’t really saying “when is it that I want this move to be done?” but “how many people do I want playing this character?” So we know that we can make things so hard that nobody will really do them without doing some horseshit (720s), we know that we can give a character easy motions and still require a lot of execution (Eddie in GGXX, Zabel in Vampire Savior, Dhalsim in ST), we know that hiding ridiculous shit behind an execution wall just leaves those few assholes to do asshole things (Vanilla MvC3 Dante), we know that a game with easy execution and still require a lot of it (MvC3 as a whole) and that if we make things super loosey goosey and combine it with a large reversal window shit kinda sucks (SF4 as a whole).
Whether you like a tighter game or a looser game is all up to the person. But thinking that broken shit will be kept in line because its hard to do? nope. It just prevents most people from being able to do it. So keep specials doable. I’m not saying get rid of QCF and DP motions but holy shit, chicken wing and other random shit need to EAD. If people aren’t willing to do that much, then there isn’t much we can do to actually help them without fucking over the games and that just isn’t worth it.
Honestly, one other thing that kept HDR from being adopted was the fact that it never got a release in Japanese arcades (despite the fact that players like Daigo and Tokido actually said it would do well there). This is why I’d say us 3S folk are more honest when it comes to this - ask us why we don’t want a rebalanced console re-release of 3rd Strike, and we’ll tell you exactly that - that it won’t stick unless it’s a new revision that hits arcades in Japan.
In any case, the point isn’t about changing the old games, but learning from them and make new games better and more accessible - things which aren’t exactly mutually exclusive.
even if they released a rebalanced 3s in arcades I’m pretty sure 99% of players would not switch. people do think Chun is too strong, but generally people are pretty happy with the game the way it is. which is why it’s one of the most active of the old fighting games across the world. someone correct me if I’m wrong and you actually know the answer, but I suspect as far as pre-09 games go, 3s is only dwarfed in worldwide active players by the good KOF games.
don’t fix what ain’t broke I say
This is a good example of the limits to balancing by execution - you can’t take some ludicrously broken bs, make it difficult and have it not be broken. Some stuff is just stupid, period. But there is a band of power within which an input that requires time and/or concentration to do helps leave the move great so it feels nice and criminal to do, but actually doesn’t break the game. It is within that band of power where I’m arguing for the validity of it.
Imagine Raging Demon being able to be done with a button press or a qcf+button input. The move is interesting precisely because it’s really strong but the unorthodox input forces the player to be creative in trying to land it. As another example, say, Karate’s ex ranbu from KOF. If it was qcf+PP or PP, the move would be broken ten ways to Sunday because its utility in whiff punishment and just ramming through stuff with invincibility frames would skyrocket. You could react to ridiculous things if you could just do it at the drop of a hat in neutral. Yet the move is fine now, when you have to put some concentration in to use it in neutral, while still allowing it to be an amazing reversal and combo tool - two applications which largely erase the cost of the input and leave the move’s properties to be more or less its raw data.
The move isn’t plainly ridiculous, but it’s really, really good. That’s the point where input requirements can be of value. Not when we’re dealing with the worst that Marvel has to offer outside the context of that madhouse.
I understand what you are trying to get at but I don’t think you understand what happens in practice. I have terrible execution and I can still do HCBF for supers on reaction. The other part of this that your missing is that reacting to things doesn’t happen at random. Akuma players could used demon ultra as an anti air. The convolution ultimately won’t really be much of a barrier unless you really and I mean really, go out of your way to make it hard.
Either way I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that super used on reaction so its motion didn’t really affect anything in the long run; unless its too 720 crazy, these are just short term hurdles to jump through. In SFxT Poongko would do about 5 EGWF in his BnB while most players couldn’t do 5 of them consecutively in training mode.
We’ve seen people land Raging Demon on reaction thanks to techniques like kara-cancelling, etc. Heck, anyone remember Infiltration back in 2012? He could basically land it every time he wanted it to.
Additionally, we’ve seen supers in SF games that turned out to be more powerful than Raging Demon in the long run, but have had easier inputs.
Thought Yun was the best character, or has that changed?
Since you mentioned KOF. Kof 98 and 02 are the most popular KOFs ever, and they both got rebalance/remakes which have been very successful. This was even though the communities loved KOF 98 OG and 02 OG. So I don’t think that prediction of 3s is necessarily correct.
Lots of old games are very active across the world, just not in the US. Newer is always better over here.
I just think 3s community is very purist about leaving the game exactly how it is, that’s been my experience. if 3s rebalance came out it’d be like the rejection of HDR but much faster I suspect. can only guess of course, I definitely doubt 3s is ever getting a rebalance.
Well HDR failed, so I doubt Capcom invests in a similar project. I mean if a remake of the last edition of SF2 couldn’t make Capcom a good profit, I doubt they would try it with any of their other fighting games.
Why should a game have different rules than reality right? So dumb
Well HDR’s release was botched in a few other ways. For example, the game kept getting delayed and came out just before SFIV (by which, more people were focused on the latter). And then the new art wasn’t really as good as people were expecting and alot of folks preferred the older art.